A Thousand Splendid Suns

open sewers. When we got there, they handed us a stick and a sheet of
canvas and told us to build ourselves a tent."
Tariq said what he remembered most about Nasir Bagh, where they had
stayed for a year, was the color brown. "Brown tents. Brown people.
Brown dogs. Brown porridge."
There was a leafless tree he climbed every day, where he straddled a
branch and watched the refugees lying about in the sun, their sores and
stumps in plain view. He watched little emaciated boys carrying water in
their jerry cans, gathering dog droppings to make fire, carving toy
AK-47s out of wood with dull knives, lugging the sacks of wheat flour that
no one could make bread from that held together. All around the refugee
town, the wind made the tents flap. It hurled stubbles of weed
everywhere, lifted kites flown from the roofs of mud hovels.
"A lot of kids died. Dysentery, TB, hunger-you name it. Mostly, that
damn dysentery. God, Laila. I saw so many kids buried. There's nothing
worse a person can see."
He crossed his legs. It grew quiet again between them for a while.
"My father didn't survive that first winter," he said. "He died in his
sleep. I don't think there was any pain."
That same winter, he said, his mother caught pneumonia and almost
died, would have died, if not for a camp doctor who worked out of a
station wagon made into a mobile clinic. She would wake up all night
long, feverish, coughing out thick, rust-colored phlegm. The queues were